If there’s one thing I dislike, it’s how I always end up forgetting which recycling bin to put out. Is it the blue, green, black, yellow, cyan, burgundy bin this week? Which day of the week is it on again? Oh I don’t know…but that’s ok, because Open Data is here to save the day!
Introducing Ottawa Trash: A project that was worked on by both Willem van Bergen and Shawn Hooper. This handy dandy application located at http://ottawatrash.ca/ lets users find out all about their localized trash schedule in the easiest way possible. Simply enter your street name, and presto!
You start with this:
Then get this:
Pure genius! In one simple click I can find out all about garbage related events in my area(The astute reader will notice that I put 50 Laurier as my place of residence…+1 for wishful thinking).
So what did we learn from this? Well, I think this is a great demonstration of the power and flexibility that open data provides us. It also shows how apps like these do not take months and months to make—this one in particular only took a few nights worth of development. This project also shows that you don’t need to necessarily write code in order to contribute to projects: Shawn Hooper did a wonderful job at manually aggregating all the garbage collection data(http://bit.ly/apNgbZ) in a format that Willem could easily use for developing the application. +1 for teamwork!
I think Willem and Shawn both deserve a trophy for this! But don’t worry, there are plenty of trophies to go around. It’s not too late to participate in creating an app before the hackfest! Don’t forget to keep up to date with our idea wiki: http://opendataottawa.pbworks.com/
Well that was episode 1 of app reviews for the Hackfest. Remember that this is just a taste of what is being done with city data. There’s a whole lot more in the works!
@pushmatrix
